Tuesday, 27 June 2017

Alternative fuel

Wake up and smell the coffee

Green entrepreneur
Arthur Kay wants the red buses that have become a landmark of London to
run on fuel generated by coffee waste.
He runs Biobean, a start-up which is gathering waste from coffee chains such as Costa and converting it into liquid fuel.
The firm is due to unveil a coffee-run bus in the capital in a few weeks.
In
London, the need to get cleaner air is vital - the dense road network
coupled with high buildings make it one of the most polluted places in
the UK.

"We are going through a period of energy divergence
where we are moving from a fossil-fuel based society to one that is
increasingly diversified. Bio-fuel will be crucial to that," said Mr
Kay.

The biochemical method by which oil is extracted from a pile
of coffee grounds is patented but uses a process which evaporates the
grounds via something known as hexane extraction.
It extracts
around 15 to 20% of oil and the remaining mass is turned into bio-mass
pellets which can be burnt as fuel in wood burners.
And, said Mr Kay, there is always a ready supply of ingredients.
"As long as people are still drinking coffee, there will be coffee waste.
"In
the UK, people consume 500,000 tonnes of coffee each year, and if we
could use all of it we could power a city such as Manchester," he said
Lots of countries are starting to see the benefits of bio-fuel, which can be made out of anything from chocolate to sewage.
Sweden
created some unwanted headlines a few years ago when it used the
carcasses of rabbits - being culled due to over-population - to make
fuel.
But before that, Sweden had a long history of using
bio-fuels and in the capital, Stockholm, 15,000 cars - many of which are
taxis - and 300 buses are now run on bio-gas.
Initially bio-fuel
was created from ethanol - which is generated from Brazilian sugar cane -
but following concerns in the mid 1990s that this was unsustainable
because it was also a food source - the country focused more on bio-gas,
made as a by-product of methane in sewage.
In order to increase
the use of bio-fuel, it converted the city's own vehicles which
encouraged petrol stations to introduce bio-fuel pumps.
"Now we
are examining new ways to generate bio-gas from food waste," said Gustaf
Landahl, head of Stockholm's smart cities project.
That includes providing households with different coloured bags to allow them to sort organic waste more easily.
"The city air quality is much better now but there are still some streets that have a problem," he said.
That
is due in part to the rise in popularity of diesel cars in recent years
and the use of studded tyres, popular in Sweden during the winter
months, which can also release pollutants.
In 2009 the EU decided
that by 2020, 10% of transport in member nations should be powered by
renewable energy but since then there has been a backlash about how
sustainable some of these sources are.
"There have been concerns
about certain bio-fuels, such as ethanol which is generated from corn or
rape-seed because they are also edible and so there is a conflict with
using the crops for food," explained Dr Cecilia Mondelli, a lecturer for
the Advanced Catalysis Engineering group at ETH Zurich.
Making such material at scale is also problematic because it requires land to grow, added Dr Mondelli.
As a result, more attention has been focused on bio-fuel that can be generated from waste products such as coffee grounds.
"Even
if you use a waste, this does not ensure that its conversion process
has a mild ecologic impact. One needs to take into account other
aspects, mainly the energy and chemical auxiliaries required and the
waste produced, to estimate the sustainability of the process in a
meaningful manner," said Dr Mondelli.
She believes that bio-fuels
will remain "a fraction of our future energy system" alongside other
sources such as hydrogen, methanol and renewables such as solar.

Some cities are choosing more conventional routes to
improving air quality with many pursuing policies that favour electric
vehicles.

Beiiing is the latest to announce plans to convert its
fleet of 70,000 taxis to electric, starting this year at a cost of
around 9 billion yen.
Norway currently boasts the world's highest
number of electric cars per capita and in March announced that electric
or hybrid cars represented half of new registrations in the country so
far this year. Sales of electric cars accounted for more than 17% of new
vehicle registrations in January, and hybrid vehicles 33.8%.
Cars
with combustion engines are heavily taxed in Norway while electric
vehicles are exempt from almost all taxes. Owners also get free access
to toll roads, ferries and parking at public car parks.
Back in London, car-maker Ford is partnering with Transport for London to pilot electric-only vans in the city.
The
number of commercial vehicles has increased by 12% in cities as more
and more people rely on fast deliveries of online goods.

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